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13. Mexicanos from Chiapas learn Spanish at school, from kindergarten onwards, but the state's culture means many do so only grudgingly. By 1971, refusing to use any Spanish terms is becoming the style among young urban lower-class Mexicanos in Chiapas and Yucatán. Guillermo "Chewy" Enciso is young and Mexicano. His parents were upwardly-mobile Chiapans of an older generation, as his Spanish first name indicates. Chewy himself is not lower-class, which is why he said "por favor" instead of "puh-leeze." Moctezuma's accent in Spanish is far worse than Chewy's, and makes him appear slow and stolid to most voters when he speaks the language. (He does, of course, speak it fluently.) It adds to his image as a solid, unimaginative, and hard-working character. Moctezuma's Mexicano but-not-too-Mexicano facial features add to this image. (While there are similarities, do not extrapolate IOW racial attitudes directly the USM. USM attitudes are much more akin to IOW Mexico in 2001 than the IOW USA in 1971.) The reason why English is associated with lower-class Mexicanos in (and ONLY in) Chiapas and Yucatán is that public education began in those states under the aegis of the federal government. It proved far easier to recruit qualified Anglo teachers than qualified Hispanos -- and anyway, at the time the government was still surreptitiously trying to promote English. The federal government's policies dovetailed with the desires of the Hispano upper class to retain their distinction from the "lower orders" in the face of rapidly increasing social mobility. Public education eventually became fully bilingual, as it did throughout the USM, but the tendency of Spanish to be associated with upper-class status grew in an ironic inverse of the situation a century earlier in Jefferson and California. The difference is starkest in Yucatán, where racial distinctions are the most marked. (Not that anyone ever puts the word "race" between the word "Progresstown" and the words "riots of '69," at least not officially.) Nationally, English is the predominant language of business and the professions. It is also the military's operating language, and is (as a result) used more than Spanish in politics. Spanish remains more common in daily life, but only slightly so, in Guadalajara, México del Norte, coastal Durango, and México Central, where there is no association between language and either race or social class. English remains more common in daily life, but only slightly so, in California, inland Durango, Arizona, and Jefferson, where there is very little association between language and either race or social class. Spanish is rare in Alaska and Hawaii, but is, of course, understood by almost everybody. FYI, 40 percent of the population of the area of IOW Mexico that comprises the FANTL states of Chiapas and Yucatán were classified as "indígena" in the 1995 census. That came to a total population of 4.9 million people. (The absolute population of indígenas/Mexicanos will be much larger in the FANTL, with better santitation and tropical medicine arriving a half-century early. The relative population, however, may be smaller.) Approximately a quarter of the indígena population over the age of 5 old speaks only an indigenous language IOW. In the FANTL, indigenous languages are doing at least as well as IOW in both Chiapas and Yucatán. That said, by 1971 the percentage of people over the age of 5 and under the age of 30 who only speak an indigenous language is negligible. (Return to The Candidate.) Category:For All Nails footnote